Many areas of Karachi remain without power till Sunday evening

After the countrywide power breakdown on Saturday night, some parts of Karachi remained deprived of power till Sunday evening as efforts to restore power continued.

Power could not be restored to many areas such as Nazimabad, North Nazimabad, North Karachi, Surjani Town and some parts of District East and District South till the evening.

The city’s sole power supplier, K-Electric (KE), said in a statement that the countrywide power breakdown on account of national grid outage cascaded to the KE network and affected Karachi’s power supply as well.

The power utility claimed that since 12 midnight, its teams had been working to restore power to the city. By late evening, according to a spokesperson for the KE, electricity supply from the national grid was resumed through existing interconnection points with KE.

The power utility said its teams were available to address any individual customer complaints received at its 118 call centre.

Meanwhile, Sindh Energy Minister Imtiaz Sheikh said that the major power breakdown throughout the country was nothing but incompetence of the federal power ministry.

Even after 12 hours, he pointed out in a statement, the federal ministry could not locate the exact fault. He demanded that the chairman of the National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC) be immediately suspended and an inquiry committee be constituted to probe the matter. Sheikh said it was a matter of great concern for the nation’s institution that the entire country plunged into darkness just because of a single power plant.

He lamented how due to lack of representations of provinces in the NTDC, there were no checks and balances. The federal government, he said, had paid no heed to the need for improving the distribution mechanism of power in its two-and-a-half year tenure. The only work the federal government had been doing was blaming the previous governments, the Sindh energy minister said.

In the meantime, the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB) said that its major water pumping stations suffered a blow after the power breakdown, due to which water supply to the city was suspended.

Only small distribution pumping stations, according to a spokesperson for the water board, could be run on generators. On Sunday evening, the water board said that with the restoration of power, the water supply was resumed to different parts of the city.

KWSB Managing Director Asadullah Khan said that during the power failure, the city could not receive around 357 million gallons of water. “The water board will take all measures to meet the gap in the water supply,” he said.